


ghosts like shards of bone

by gen_is_gone



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death, Nonbinary Doctor (Doctor Who), Originally Written for Light in the Dark: an Eighth Doctor Charity Fanzine, title changed from the zine because I hated it, weird architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25429996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gen_is_gone/pseuds/gen_is_gone
Summary: Grief works in funny ways.
Relationships: Anji Kapoor & Fitz Kreiner, Eighth Doctor & Anji Kapoor, Eighth Doctor & Fitz Kreiner
Kudos: 12





	ghosts like shards of bone

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the excellent _Light in the Dark_ , of which you can ask about digital copies here:
> 
> https://eightzine.tumblr.com/
> 
> (As I mentioned in the tags, I changed the title from what it is in the zine because in hindsight I really don't like it. If I remember correctly, I was on a deadline and couldn't think of a better one.)

She tries to retrace her steps, remember how they got here. As usual, it begins with a mistake.

... 

The TARDIS is free-floating somewhere and somewhen in space, "resting her legs" as the Doctor put it. That sort of anthropomorphizing of the vehicle has stopped worrying Anji by now, but the Doctor's proclivity for metaphors that make an alarming amount of sense while explaining absolutely nothing is still bemusing. She's alone in a sitting room off to the side of the console room, enjoying a mani-pedi from a polite, rotund little robot bauble they picked up the last time they chanced upon a developed nation in C31, and listening to a podcast from about fifteen years in her own future. It's three brothers playing Dungeons and Dragons with their father, terribly geeky. She doesn't get a fraction of the pop-culture references. She should hate it. Dave would've loved it.

Anji's mood borders on mordant, but the family is genuinely funny, and she finds in her a sort of wistful nostalgia that doesn't hurt, quite. Her ghosts aren't at war with her these days, even if she's not quite at peace. She isn't sure where the others have wandered off, and she doesn't care to know. In a while maybe she'll break this moment, go find Fitz and bother him, or see if the Doctor is doing anything interestingly foolish. For now however, she smiles to herself, listening with only as much focus as she wants to muster, and lets the robot work its magic.

This is what she plans to do, in any case.

Anji feels something dreadful, not physical as much as premonitory, before the Cloister Bell even calls out. The floor shudders beneath her, and the robot retracts into a ball in self-defense and rolls across the room as the whole edifice unexpectedly shudders.

This is both frightening and not unusual, and as such, there's an undercurrent of irritation beneath her alarm. It's hardly as if they haven't taken hard landings and random attacks from space bugs before. The lights are flickering. The Cloister Bell reverberates behind her rib cage. She wipes her wet hand on the front of her shirt as she scrambles to her feet, but doesn't make it to the door without falling through into the console room in a heap of limbs and swear words. The Doctor is, predictably, running in overexcited circles around the console, yelling probably only to themself. Fitz is nowhere to be seen.

"What the hell is it--" she gets out as she splays across the hall again. "--is it this time?"

"You know, I'm not entirely sure?" The Doctor shouts, amiably if loudly. "I was trying to find a watercolor paint kit I know I bought for Miranda and left about somewhere. I have utterly no idea what's troubling the old girl!"

They're far too cheerful. Anji clambers up again, this time grabbing the console rail for support as books go flying overhead. The ground is tilted at an awful angle. She's surprised at how surprised she isn't. She's mostly annoyed that her hands are half-done.

"Well Doctor, could you figure it out before my brain purees inside my skull please!" she shouts with maybe more force than she feels. They give her an apologetic nod and dive back to work at the console. A few bone-jarring seconds' worth of cajoling and button-prodding later, they've settled into a rhythm that's, if not smooth by any means, at least bearable. They glance back up at her.

"Anji, now that we've stabilized a little, would you mind going to check on Fitz? He shouldn't be too deep in the TARDIS, but when we're in crisis-mode, I prefer to have him near to hand." They blink. "And you as well of course."

Anji doesn't dignify that with a comment, just nods and half-heartedly throws a thumbs up as she stumbles back out into the main hallway.

She’s almost through into the corridor before a concussion blast throws her bodily forward, and has just long enough to regret how much all of her is going to eventually hurt before she blacks out.

... 

Fitz Kreiner sits with his second-favorite guitar in one of the TARDIS ballrooms, (the one without the grand piano) practicing vocal warm ups where no one but the TARDIS herself can hear him. He’s very much lost in his own head, in tune with the joy of singing loudly with no one else around to judge. While this too is a performance, it’s only for himself. When the gong of the Cloister Bell interrupts him, he cuts off with a long-suffering sigh, and wanders out to see what all the fuss is about. He is perhaps the least surprised of the TARDIS’s three occupants to realize that, as he wrenches open the ballroom door and steps outside, he’s no longer within the TARDIS at all.

... 

As it turns out, Anji hurts considerably less than she’d been expecting, upon waking. Physically, at least. Emotionally, she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t bruised. She regains consciousness to a feeling of distinct unease.

She clambers to her feet on an open wooden veranda, of the sort one might find on a stereotypical Southern American estate. It’s a house, she thinks. It’s very large, so it’s hard to tell. For all Anji knows it could be a city with a roof, but it’s shaped like a house. The porch stretches away in either direction farther than she can see. It’s very dark.

She turns away from the structure itself to peer over the edge of the railing and immediately recoils, throwing herself backwards away from the edge of the porch. It's not just night sky above the house, but all around it too. This place is adrift in space. Anji breathes in slowly to the count of ten, trying to force her heart rate back down to something approaching healthy. It's not the first time she's seen something like this. She's witnessed the Doctor throw open the doors of the TARDIS to the empty void before. She's even sat with her legs dangling off the edge of the doorsill, breathing impossible air cradled in a force-field she took on trust would protect her. But this isn't the TARDIS, and the Doctor is missing. There's no trust that any of this will hold. She's cold, in just a blouse and slacks. She shivers and for just a second imagines warm arms wrapping around her. Her face spasms, but she doesn't let it crumple, thinking of Dave. Anji is halfway used to existential dread by now but it doesn't make it any more fun to deal with. She's tired of grief and fear.

She turns toward the House, and the door, or rather, Door, (it seems to deserve the mental capital letter) shut but not locked. She doesn't really have a choice. It's stay out on this porch looking out into space, hoping the Doctor will simply appear, or go into the House and try and find stable ground. Not enticing options. The silent stillness is getting to her, eating at her nerves as it swallows all the sound, even muffling her breathing and making it strange in her ears. She can't stay out here. Even if it's safer she doesn't know how much longer her frayed nerves can last before she snaps, and she doesn't know what she'll do if she does. There is absolutely no other choice, she decides. She opens the door and steps through. 

Of its own volition, the door snaps shut behind her.

... 

It'd seemed normal enough on the surface. There wasn’t any one thing that gave it away. It’s a big library, large enough to obscure just how big it really is. It’s the kind of library you'd find in a rich person's house, only with a bigger and far more random collection. Fitz thinks of the drunk in a novel written by his namesake exclaiming his surprise that the books in that library were real.

"What thoroughness! What realism!" he mutters to himself. Admittedly, this makes him the drunk partygoer, but he can't exactly protest that. It's not like any of the main characters are really any better.

But more's the point; it had seemed like any old library at first. Not so now. After wandering round one blind turn too many, he abruptly realizes there's no way this all fits in the space he saw at the front of the room. And even worse, if not remotely shocking, he's lost.

He knows what to do about lost, even if he doesn’t want to do it. Sitting still and waiting for rescue might work for some people, but in Fitz’s experience, it’s more likely to get one captured at gunpoint than swept into heroic arms. Instead, he looks to the books for clues.

... 

Wherever they are, it appears they are not. Or, to clarify: wherever they are, soon after their arrival, _will not be_. The Doctor had managed to keep their feet during the intra-TARDIS explosion that had knocked Anji clean back out of the console room, and had sprinted to find her just as soon as the smoke had cleared. There was no way out of the room when they’d looked however, and they think it was the TARDIS’s way of telling them that wherever Anji’d ended up, she was no longer on the ship. She was very clever and helpful like that. So they’d left the TARDIS, on the assumption that if Anji was nowhere on the ship, then probably neither was Fitz, and the old girl was probably better capable of shifting for herself than either of their companions.

Outside the doors was chaos. What looked like a room was already rapidly collapsing into so much Cubist, physics-defying geography. They’d had to leap out of the way to prevent a chandelier the size of a compact car from crashing down on them, and in the ensuing confusion, the TARDIS sank through the floor. She’ll be alright. The Doctor is currently far more concerned about themself. 

So far, every corridor they wander down melts or dissolves or bursts into abstract clusters of math as they pass through it. They can sense a sort of psychic roar, of pain or rage or anguish, or possibly all three, and the not-sound disturbs them greatly. They want very much to find the source of the madness, but they lack a place to stand. And they’re developing a sneaking suspicion of what the problem might be. 

The Doctor's working theory is alarming and beguiling all at once, so much so that they can't quite bring themself to approach it head-on. If true, it would mean they were all in the gravest peril, and the need to find Anji and Fitz would be even more pressing. But it could also provide answers of the type they'd longed for for over a century by now. They don't know how to prove it, and given the shiftless firmament roiling beneath their feet, they aren't in a position to test their theory. But nevertheless, they need to know.

For want of a better option, they beeline into a corner of a room that still looks somewhat stable, wobble to the ground, and lay down on an oozing checked-tile floor with the palms of their hands pressed down flat against the tile, sensing with intangible feelers for a clue. 

The psychic residue of what the Doctor has forgotten is called Artron energy is highly distinctive. It tastes a little like klaxon horns and metal, and reeks of raw time. They gasp and leap to their feet as the ground sucks at their shoes.

It seems what they'd hoped and feared is true: they've collided with another TARDIS.

... 

It’s very quiet just inside the Door. Inside, it doesn’t really resemble a house at all. It’s a vast, glinting grey forest. The quiet is an improvement on the sucking maw of silence outside, but only just. A susurrus of wind on glass moves through the structures like a sigh, and Anji notices what they are. She’s standing in a forest of mirrors.

She takes a few hesitant steps forward and chances a glance into one of them. It doesn’t reflect her. She’d honestly have been more surprised if it had. Instead, she sees a fragment of a scene from somewhere else entirely. It’s an idyllic seaside picture; a family dressed in old-fashioned clothes, father, mother, little boy with squiggly hair, taking a stroll by the seaside somewhere in England. The boy is balanced all-too precariously on a low wall, and inevitably, as she watches, he falls and scrapes his knee. His parents both rush to soothe him as he cries. He looks strangely familiar, though she can’t place where she might have seen him before. 

The next mirror shows her a group of teenage girls in clothes only about ten years out of style, sitting in an attic, clustered around one girl lying on her back who is clearly stoned off her nut. Anji can’t hear what anyone is saying, but the girl’s mouth is moving frantically and she waves about vaguely, pointing at the ceiling. 

The mirror after that offers up a red-haired woman in a pod of some kind, floating in liquid with electrodes stuck all over her head. She looks strangely half-done, like a painter had forgot to add a final layer of shadows and highlights to her skin. 

She glances into another mirror out of the corner of her eye. Then she gasps and looks again. She doesn’t look away for a long time.

... 

Maddeningly, Fitz can’t find an exit, or even the way he came in. By this point he knows the library is playing with him, and he’s no longer feeling entirely playful. Helpful brass plaques affixed to the shelves offer gibberish in a dozen different scripts. He grabs a book at random off one of the shelves. It’s a compendium of Greek mythology. He lets it fall open, and it shows him the minotaur in Dedalus’s maze. No one around to hear him, he curses the room loudly, but admits to himself that he’d probably find it very funny if it had happened to someone else.

Another book mocks him with _The Lost City of Z_. Thereafter follows _I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings_ , for variety. 

The book after that has an illustration of a bone-colored edifice hanging in the sky above a burning red planet, and Fitz feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

... 

It’s Dave. More specifically, it’s her and Dave, talking beneath a tree in summer time. Anji watches herself pluck a grey hair from Dave’s head as he makes a face at her. This particular memory feels like punishment, and comes with rolling waves of shame for her months’ old betrayal. She can’t stand to look, but she can’t look away.

She watches herself kiss her dead boyfriend and suddenly finds the will to break away as a knot forms behind her throat. Her heart is beating faster again, beginning to gallup and pound inside her head. Unbidden, she turns to yet another mirror. 

Dave, enthusiastically dissembling about _Professor X_ as her eyes glaze over. Another mirror.

Dave, on their third date, doing voices as she dissolves into gales of laughter across the table. Another mirror.

Dave, bleeding out in a bus as flames engulf him. She tears her eyes away.

“ _What do you want!_ ” she screams at nothing. Her voice sounds strange and raw in her ears. Unexpectedly, she gets a response, the question arriving in her mind absent sound.

\-- Why do you hurt -- she doesn’t hear.

... 

The Doctor has discovered the problem. Unfortunately, they can’t think of a way to solve it. It seems their very presence is disturbing the ship. They can find no solid ground not because the whole of the being is decaying, but because they are, by merely setting foot inside her, killing her from the inside out. Here, they are literally a poison. The thought appalls. They can’t leave anyone or anything in distress of this magnitude. It’s in their very name. Adopting a Doctorly air, they address their question to the crumbling TARDIS.

... 

Fitz isn’t so much reading this as seeing it in vivid detail behind his eyes, clearer perhaps, then it has been since he lived it. Certainly clearer than the memories have been lately, through whatever fog has clouded them since he got the Doctor back. Words form on the page, these ones actually visible. A question.

\-- Why do you hurt -- it reads. He could laugh.

 _Why_ wouldn’t _I hurt?_ He thinks.

... 

“Why do you hurt?” the Doctor cries, unsure of who might answer.

\-- Because /you/ hurt. You hurt, and it hurts us. You are hurting. You are unmaking. --

They’d expected that answer, but unfortunately, they still have no diagnosis.

... 

It brings her up short, the disembodied question reverberating inside her skull.

-Why do you hurt- comes again, and Anji struggles to formulate a response. “I loved him,” she says at last. “I love him.” 

\-- He is dead. You are lost. You have no family. You could be our family. --

And it...opens up in front of her. She imagines diving into one of the mirrors, becoming the Anji in that world, living with Dave in a pool full of memories, with no Doctor, no TARDIS, no fear or future podcasts or manicure robots or pain or even death; just an eternity with Dave in something approximating bliss. The mirror is right there. It yawns at her.

“No.” she says evenly. “You aren’t my ghosts. You are not my Dave. You are not my family. I cannot be yours.” 

She suppresses all manner of distressed fidgeting, stomps hard on a sob, and goes on.  
“I grieve him. He died too soon, for no real reason. But--” she falters, takes a breath, presses on, “I’m learning how to manage it. The grief. The sorrow. I’ve done some terrible things while I was hurting, because I was hurting. One of the worst things I’ve learned about grief is that even that gets old. It’s tiring, being sad. I don’t want to remember him and only remember that he’s dead. I love him, and I want to remember loving him. I can’t always seek joy, but I can at least try not to drown in despair. I can look for other things to love.”

It takes the wind out of her just saying it, but for all it costs her, the truth strengthens her as well. She needs to hear herself say it for it to really be real. 

The psychic despair of her rejection hits her like a physical blow. She howls with it, the loneliness and pain. This dying thing seeking new family, trapping people within its walls, can’t bear another loss. She grieves so hard she knows she’ll die of it, mourning sisters she’s never had, lamenting her...pilot. Her pilot is lost. They are all lost. The House has nothing left.

It rends the world apart. At her words, the mirrors shatter outward, and she screams as shards of ice and memory and ordinary glass strike her face, her hands, her neck. A sound like metal tearing apart, amplified until she hears it from inside her own soul, accompanies a catastrophic wave beneath her feet. The House is falling apart.

... 

Fitz is hit in the head with a book, and then several books. A few seconds later, even his screams are muffled beneath the mountain of literature as the shelves creak, and fall like timber.

... 

The roaring increases to the point of pain, then beyond, before going suddenly, deathly quiet.

The Doctor screams in frustration. The TARDIS is dead. The ground is solidifying again beneath their feet, whitening terribly. Instinctively, they know the three of them haven’t got long before the inside and the outside are no longer transcendent and they are expelled, forcibly, from the corpse. For some reason, this is dreadfully familiar. They don’t care to contemplate why. 

In the space forming around them are uncountable books and shards of glass. And two living heart beats other than their own. Fitz is a battered mess and Anji looks haunted. There is no time to feel for them. The Doctor grabs ahold of the both of them and races towards a Door, dangling half off of a hinge that only seems to exist because mortal minds can’t contemplate the actual nature of the portal. The Doctor can see both images at once, the broken door and the rent temporal gate. They drag their companions through, out onto a veranda made of wood like bone going brittle beneath their feet. The TARDIS, _their_ TARDIS, waits ever faithfully, her doors already open.

... 

They’re talking beneath a tree in summer time. The Doctor is attempting to explain.

“No. I don’t know what it was, or what was wrong with it. It seems to have been drawn to our TARDIS, but by colliding with us within the Vortex, we punctured its heart. I don’t think it’s your fault, Anji. It was already dying when we found our way inside.”

She knows immediately that they’re lying, as they are sometimes (often) prone to. She assumes they’re sparing her feelings for having killed the other TARDIS, and doesn’t stop to think until quite some time later that they might’ve been sparing their own. She turns and hugs them, grabbing Fitz too and dragging him in, and the weight of all three of them makes her weak at the knees and she sinks to the ground, taking both of them with her. She can feel the TARDIS against her side, warm like a living thing as always. They all cling together.

They sit like this for a while, the three of them and the TARDIS, holding on tight.


End file.
